The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

I believe the fact that Polish uses the Latin alphabet (with a small Slavic twist to express the extra sounds) meant it was much easier for Poland to align itself westward. I think the average Pole is much closer culturally to the Western neighbours than to a Ukrainian or Russian (maybe apart from cuisine).

It's just like the new Copilot 365. Every time I try to type "Ć", Copilot pops up. I have to close the app constantly.

The real issue here is first that browsers don't expose a simple way to check for key combinations and second that developers don't bother building their own. You'll find on any number of sites that an intended key combination can also be invoked with additional modifiers of alt or shift or whatnot. Even here, the code shown only fixes the broader issue on windows; alt+cmd+s still gets blocked.

There should be a proposal for browsers to expose a property on the keydown/up/press event containing a code for the key combination. Something like "CTRL+S", "CTRL+ALT+S", etc. The programmer could then switch over this property rather than having to check key codes and modifiers manually.

I would also propose to any web developers that they build this property themselves in their own code and check against it instead of checking modifiers directly. Not only would it protect against bugs like in the OP, it would also be a lot more convenient to use.

Fun fact: when treated with unicode Normalization Form Canonical Decomposition, 8 out of 9 polish letters (ż,ó,ć,ę,ś,ą,ź,ń) break down into base letter + combining diacritical mark, but ł stays intact. That means you can't use sqlite's unicode61 remove_diacritics tokenizer to normalize polish text for FTS.

The linguistic, historical, and cultural information is so fascinating, and really well explained.

> Polish is the second most-used Slavic language, right after Russian and just before Ukrainian

This is not exactly right regarding Ukrainian. While it is the official language of Ukraine, in reality... let's say that not all Ukrainian people are actually speaking it.

Obligatory plug of my keyboard layout which solves the awkward right hand contortions: https://pzel.name/pl-lefty.html

It comes bundled with xorg nowadays, you can use:

  Option                "XkbVariant" "lefty"

This was a fun read. Here is the tl;dr version:

> Instead of blindly and greedily blocking Ctrl S, we could block Ctrl S only if Alt key was not pressed.

Ctrl alt s was the keyboard shortcut for the polish S. Ctrl s was blocked to improve saving. And this also blocked ctrl alt s too.

As I am fond of saying: "The good news about Open Source is that you've got the source code; the bad news about Open Source is that _you've_ got the source code."

That is, you may well get sucked down a rabbit hole in order to accomplish a simple task.

(2015)

“Polish uses the English/Latin alphabet” - was it developed back when the US and Italy were allies in ancient Roman times?